Legislatin' in America

And if you're really crazy, you can make it here. It's been Stupid News Month in legislative America, presumably because the elections are over and a new batch of crackpots (or, let's face it, more often the same set of crackpots) have successfully moved into their new offices and gotten that whole ugly mess of having to appear reasonable behind them. Thus, we get a bunch of crazy bills that for the most part aren't going anywhere, coupled with another bunch of crazy bills (usually about womenfolk sexytimes or how certain kinds of scientists are tools of the devil) that probably are going somewhere, because those particular kinds of crazy have a whole movement behind them.

This Politico breakdown of some of the happenings in our various states is mixed, I think. A California law saying that police can't use the fact that you're carrying a condom in your purse as evidence you are probably a hooker seems actually a pretty good idea, because holy crap apparently police can do that? A law to allow miniature horses to be used as seeing eye, er, horses? Fine with me. A Montana law legalizing (licensed) salvaging of roadkill deer for meat, and allowing wounded but not dead ones to be finished off? Sure, whatever. Just because a law deals with an unusual problem doesn't automatically make it a foolish law.

The remainder of the bills fall into two camps. There's the anti-science or pro-my-religion-only bills, many of which we've covered here. An Oklahoma legislative yahoo has introduced yet another bill trying to assert creationism as equally valid to any of that science-stuff we're teaching our youngsters, or at least equal enough for you to get a good grade on your term paper if you say "God did it" with sufficient moral force. There's the Mississippi ban against the creation of human-animal hybrids, which seems to exist solely as a setup for any number of inappropriate jokes about Mississippi. I'll toss Virginia crackpot Bob Marshall's bill for Virginia to mint its own currency in that pile as well, simply because the goldbugs are a religion unto themselves.

And then there's the worst bills of all, the narcissistic nothing bills. They don't have a chance of passing, and if they did pass they'd be found to be unconstitutional by the courts in less time than it'd take to actually print the subsequent court decision out. All they do is waste legislative time and resources, intentionally, so that some twit with a chip on his shoulder can wag his finger and say he "proved his point," where "his point" was usually either indecipherable or something that any reasonable person seeking reelection really oughtn't confess to out loud. In this camp we can toss Mike Leara's Missouri bill making it a felony for other legislators to propose gun safety laws, which seems to exist solely to prove that Mike Leara does not know how to gubbern and should be nowhere near the building. And Idaho Republican John Goedde introduced a bill putting Ayn Rand's doorstop classic Atlas Shrugged on the high school reading list, apparently in an attempt to increase teen suicide rates in his state; this one, too, was done simply to prove he could.

I'd rank these bills as especially egregious simply because even the people who introduced them don't expect them to pass, don't particularly care if they pass, and/or (in Leara's case) know full well they'd be struck down immediately if they did pass, but they're still willing to piss away legislative time, staff and resources on the things purely as publicity stunt. Narcissistic is the most polite way of putting it; there are certainly others.